"We came up with the idea based on the title and lyric 'we are explorers'," PARTY creative director and founder Masashi Kawamura told Dezeen. "We wanted to create a story of explorers but wanted create the journey in a never seen before way, so we decided to create 200 figurines using 3D printing and film them as stop-motion animation."

The video directed by Masashi Kawamura, Qanta Shimizu and Aramique Krauthamer for Cut Copy follows the tiny characters as they navigate the streets: encountering litter, scaling mail boxes and collecting objects found along their journey.

For the stop-motion sequence, the two hundred figurines were created on a Stratasys 1200es printer with UV reactive filament.

The team used handheld black lights to create the luminosity during the seven days of filming in Los Angeles, then exaggerated the brightness slightly during post production.

"We used UV reactive filament to print the figurines on the 3D printer, so they glowed under the black light," said Kawamura.

Once they had finished, PARTY made the files used to create the video open source so others could try it out.

"We wanted to create an experience bigger than just the video," explained Kawamura, "so we decided to release all the 3D data and storyboard for free on Bit Torrent, so the people can actually recreate the whole video if they want to."

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